Hello everyone,
This month, in praise of the container! A new container for our RE.MEMBERING workshops - Lake Studios just next to Berlin's biggest lake. New dates for March, April and May editions of the workshop series. Come for just one or for many! More details below, plus a booklist, of what I've been reading this last year.
Cat
RE.MEMBERING
a new monthly workshop series for creators from all disciplines
March, April and May workshops at Lake Studios Berlin, a few minutes from Müggelsee...
I wrote to you last time about our new space of refuge - our monthly workshop/ training/ hedgeschool. The first session was a beautiful gathering at Dock11 and we have more coming soon! The next is at Dock11 on Sunday 19th February 10:00 - 13:00. There will also be a special evening of storytelling after training, starting at 17:30.
And we’re delighted to release the dates for March, April and May,which will be at the wonderful Lake Studios, a short S-bahn journey to the edge of Berlin, right next to the glorious Müggelsee and the forest.
For more info and to get tickets, please click the relevant button below!
BOOKS IN BAGS
- the books that have been a refuge for me in the last year
Listen to the text below here:
“It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. […] Le Guin’s stories are capacitous bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living. A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.”
~ Donna Haraway
I’ve been a refined collector of bags for a long time. An owner of functional bags: pannier bags, rucksacks of varying sizes, stuff sacks to go inside the bags. Everything I carry with me can be found inside a babushka style arrangement of bags. In my waking hours I have a yellow stuff sack just for books and notebooks. In my sleeping hours I have been known to have dreams about packing bags. Not wanting to go too much more deeply into the sort of arrangement my psyche is looking for, I was delighted to read something that supports my (mild) obsession with the bag, the container!
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is a beautiful slam-dunk of a book. A bold swipe at the Hero story - the recurrent, compulsive narrative of the patriarchy - and a gentle telling of a new one, a new story, a new metaphor in which new multiplicities may be contained.
I deeply recommend it.
And while we’re on the subject – here are some of the books I carried (in bags) with me through the last year. The ones that really moved me.
1. Donna Haraway (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Duke Press
I came across Haraway’s work at University but couldn’t appreciate her wild genius then! Her most recent book Staying with the Trouble is magnificent and magnificently zany, in true Haraway fashion. A precious, necessary word-spinner, world-maker and trouble-stirrer.
“Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
And if you want to dive a bit deeper, watch the wonderful, bizarre documentary about her: Storytelling for Earthly Survival. You can find it on Vimeo on demand.
2. Jay Griffiths (2021). Why Rebel. Penguin
A beautiful, troubling, affirming, kinning series of essays from the wonderful author of Wild.
“If I were asked what is the greatest human gift, I would say it is metaphor. A little boat of metaphor chugs across the seas, carrying a cargo of meaning across the oceans that divide us. Metaphor is how we relate to each other and how our species attempts to comprehend others. With this gift, humans listen and speak more intensely and the meaning of all things – ocean or forest, snail or chaffinch – grow outwards in concentric rings of concentrated word-poems. [...] Metaphor works with the legerdemain of the psyche, the lightest of touches to shift the mindscape, transforming one thing into another, leading to new ways of seeing. Metaphor follows Emily Dickinson’s injunction to ‘tell the truth but tell it slant’, so, slantwise by Saturn-mind running rings around literalism, metaphor is a canted incantation, it breathes life into facts, it enchants. And metaphor is the language of the shaman and the artist.”
3. Marion Woodman (1992) Leaving My Father’s House. Shambhala
Jungian analyst Marion Woodman is co-writer here with three of her analysands, who share their stories of healing, accompanied by the Grimm fairy tale of Allerleirauh. This is an incredible in-depth journey into conscious femininity.
“If we concentrate on the images in our stories and dreams until we distil their truth, we ground ourselves in the reality of our own imagery. Life lived from our inner truth is not an empty performance. It is a dynamic moment-by-movement discovery. Distilling the truth of the image is the work.”
4. Kirsty Bell (2022) The Undercurrents. A Story of Berlin. Fitzcarraldo Editions
A beautiful mix of biography, psychogeography, historical study – a hybrid literary portrait of a nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal and the city itself. The author’s voice joins many less heard voices in a polyphonic history of the city.
5. Kae Tempest (2020). On Connection. Faber & Faber
A short heartsy, gutsy manifesto on connection, performance and writing from poet/performer Kae Tempest.
“James Joyce told me once: ‘In the particular is contained the universal.’ I appreciated the advice. It taught me that the closer attention I pay to my ‘particular’, the better chance I have of reaching you in yours.”
6. bell hooks (2001). All About Love. New Visions
A classic and a vital defining and digging into what is love.
“The word ‘love’ is most often described as a noun, yet... we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”
7. Chungliang Al Huang (2011). Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. Singing Dragon
A beautiful, diverse approach to the essence of the practice of Tai Chi by a playful martial-artist-dancer. Spanning calligraphy, art, movement and philosophy. For practitioners of any level or those who are curious.
I’d love to hear what are your books of the moment. Please leave a comment!